The 13th Floor Elevators - The Psychedelic Sounds of the 13th Floor Elevators (1966)
Two decades before the Reagan administration told America to say no to drugs, Austin’s 13th Floor Elevators pushed a different message: say yes to LSD. On their groundbreaking debut, the progenitors of psychedelic rock pioneer the original musical acid trip.
Throughout the mid ‘60s, airwaves sizzled with the frayed tones of garage rock. The Psychedelic Sounds takes the fuzz-laden principle of proto-punk apart and builds a funhouse out of the pieces, warping the sound into a sprawl of mystifying melodies.
Stacy Sutherland conjures doom and ecstasy in a wild series of guitar leads, soaking his axe in dizzying distortion and anxious feedback. Tommy Hall takes the album into the realm of the bizarre with his undulating electric jug, further disorienting each track and giving the band an unmistakable signature. Lead vocalist Roky Erickson roars and drones over the swarming instrumentals, guiding the record through all the emotional extremes of a trip.
More than a half-century after The 13th Floor Elevators flipped rock and roll on its head, music fans remain largely unaware of their contributions. Despite the best efforts of the Reverberation Appreciation society, who named themselves and the Levitation festival after Elevators’ songs, Austin’s psychedelic revolutionaries continue to exist in relative obscurity. Instead, most of the recognition goes to the San Francisco bands they gigged with in the summer before recording The Psychedelic Sounds. Anyone who places the genesis of psychedelia at Haight-Ashbury fails to see psychedelic music for what it is: a movement so bizarre it could only have started in Austin.
Dinosaur Jr - Without a Sound (1994)
By the time Dinosaur Jr. began recording Without a Sound, only J Mascis remained from their original lineup. Rather than try to recapture the searing sludge of the band’s late '80s classics, however, Mascis streamlines his angst into 46 minutes of alt-rock bangers.
Without a Sound kicks off a pair of late ‘90s Dinosaur Jr. albums performed almost entirely by J Mascis. Abandoning the raw aggression of the band’s first three records, Mascis prioritizes atmosphere and melody, layering propulsive guitar hooks and coating his deadpan vocals in muddy tones. He replaces Murph on drums with alacrity, heading up a tight rhythm section that infuses the record with vitality.
Detailed production brings out all of the musical strata in gratifying clarity, allowing for Mascis’ multi-instrumental talents to reach full realization. The former noise-monger general of indie rock even makes time in the tracklist for a couple of tender acoustic moments, especially in the somber soft arpeggios of “Seemed Like the Thing to Do.”
Mascis’ updated approach proved a jolt for Dinosaur Jr., as Without a Sound charted better than any of the band’s previous releases. Still, hardcore fans devote most of their obsession to You’re Living All Over Me and Bug. Coming into Austin Psych Fest with their original lineup restored and their setlist solely comprising Without a Sound, Dinosaur Jr. gives stoners who dismissed the album when it first came out a chance to reconsider.
Geordie Greep - The New Sound (2024)
In August 2024, black midi frontman Geordie Greep sent shockwaves through the underground rock world when he announced the band had broken up. The New Sound justifies the split, as Greep blasts jazz fusion into previously unexplored depths of eclecticism and perversion.
The ideas put forth in the lyrics of The New Sound make a mockery of absurdity. Greep’s characters, who he bases off people he met at the bar, mix depravity and vulnerability into a potent cocktail of confessions pregnant with dark sexual fantasies. Beyond their ability to shock, Greep’s verses viciously satirize toxic masculinity, cutting deepest on the record’s unhinged opener.
Greep engineers a manic and cosmopolitan blend of styles just as disorienting as his writing. He infuses decadent sambas with the sensibilities of his dark-prog epics, creating a fiery explosion of sound in the process. His virtuoso guitar work dazzles as the instrumental centerpiece, darting through impossibly intricate solos and bombarding tracks with rabid refrains. Sensitivity replaces intensity for long stretches, particularly on the lush orchestral tides of “As if Waltz.” Greep even covers a Sinatra ballad to close out the tracklist, abandoning his spoken word ravings for a croon on “If You Are But a Dream.”
As an expert of the avant-garde and not the psychedelic, Greep may seem an odd choice for Austin Psych Fest. The mastermind behind The New Sound achieves psychedelia through surrealism. Greep’s world on his debut is as dreamlike as any for its utter rejection of the constraints of reality.
Godspeed You! Black Emperor - “NO TITLE AS OF 13 FEBRUARY 2024 28,340 DEAD” (2024)
Godspeed You! Black Emperor know how to say everything without saying anything at all. On “NO TITLE AS OF 13 FEBRUARY 2024 28,340 DEAD,” their tacit symphonies confront the war in Gaza.
The West experiences the war in Gaza from a distance. “NO TITLE AS OF 13 FEBRUARY 2024 28,340 DEAD” journeys into the war’s infernal epicenter, soundtracking a reality too urgent to ignore.
Like preceding Godspeed You! Black Emperor releases, “NO TITLE AS OF 13 FEBRUARY 2024 28,340 DEAD” explores the capabilities of instruments as mimetic devices. Roaring guitar tones soar overhead, while deafening drums bludgeon the earth in waves of sonic chaos.
These sounds of war punctuate a moving narrative whose beats follow the winds of an unpredictable atmosphere. Ominous static sets the stage for impending attack, building tension until a rush of calamity provides a tempestuous resolution. The resulting peril gives way to the album’s darkest moment, as Godspeed wades through corpses and rubble on the apocalyptic reflections of “PALE SPECTATOR TAKES PHOTOGRAPHS.”
Unlike the other entries on this list, “NO TITLE AS OF 13 FEBRUARY 2024 28,340 DEAD” makes for an intensely sobering experience. The record forces its audience to envision horrors that most in the West are complicit in, whether intentionally or unintentionally. Though it lacks psychedelic hallmarks, its crushing immersion has the same mind-altering power as anything you will hear at Austin Psych Fest.
Yo La Tengo - Painful (1993)
Despite releasing five LPs between 1986 and 1992, Yo La Tengo consider Painful their first album. In 48 intimate minutes, the indie rock legends find their signature sound in an unlikely marriage of abrasion and supple romance.
In the 38 years since guitarist Ira Kaplan and drummer Georgia Hubley’s wedding, the couple have charted their life together through song. Painful uses a queer sonic pallet to express the emotional heft of their connection. Kaplan and Hubley never waver in their gentle vocal approach, as if afraid to raise their voices at one another. A droning racket of guitar feedback carves serrated textures into the fabric of the album, scoring sweet sentiments until aggression and affection blend into one another.
Painful’s noisy guitar effects blanket the record in a hazy atmosphere, and some of Yo La Tengo’s warmest moments nestle below. “Nowhere Near” glides into quaint and rustic tranquility, as Hubley captures the nerves of catching butterflies in six entrancing minutes. “The Whole of the Law” makes a more epic statement, as oceans of amorous imagery wash over its hypnotic harmonies.
Painful sets the precedent for a run of Yo La Tengo classics that bled from the ‘90s into the new millennium. The group expands on the album’s sonically conflicted ethos in every subsequent project, eventually reaching their experimental apex on 2000’s And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out. Decades on, their disorienting charm persists, and they’ll bring it with them to Austin Psych Fest this weekend.